“Joseph,” says Brugsch, “was never at the court of an Egyptian Pharaoh, but found his place with the Semitic monarchs, who reigned at Avaris-Tanis in the Delta, and whose power extended from this point as far as Memphis and Heliopolis.”  The “king who knew not Joseph” was evidently the restored Egyptian dynasty of Thebes.  These monarchs would be naturally averse to all the Palestinian inhabitants of the land.  And the monuments of their reigns represent the labors of subject people, under task-masters, cutting, carrying, and laying stones for the walls of cities.

To what race do the Egyptians belong?  The only historic document which takes us back so far as this is the list of nations in the tenth chapter of Genesis.  We cannot, indeed, determine the time when it was written.  But Bunsen, Ebers,[181] and other ethnologists are satisfied that the author of this chapter had a knowledge of the subject derived either from the Phoenicians or the Egyptians.  Ewald places his epoch with that of the early Jewish kings.  According to this table the Egyptians were descended from Ham, the son of Noah, and were consequently of the same original stock with the Japhetic and Semitic nations.  They were not negroes, though their skin was black, or at least dark.[182] According to Herodotus they came from the heart of Africa; according to Genesis (chap. x.) from Asia.  Which is the correct view?

The Egyptians themselves recognized no relationship with the negroes, who only appear on the monuments as captives or slaves.

History, therefore, helps us little in this question of race.  How is it with Comparative Philology and Comparative Anatomy?

The Coptic language is an idiom of the old Egyptian tongue, which seems to belong to no known linguistic group.  It is related to other African languages only through the lexicon, and similarly with the Indo-European.  Some traces of grammatic likeness to the Semitic may be found in it; yet the view of Bunsen and Schwartz, that in very ancient times it arose from the union of Semitic and Indo-European languages, remains only a hypothesis.[183] Merx (in Schenkel’s Bibel-Lexicon) says this view “rests upon a wish formed in the interest of the Philosophy of History; and the belief of a connection between these tongues is not justified by any scientific study of philology.  No such ethnological affinity can be granted,—­a proof of which is that all facts in its favor are derived from common roots, none from common grammar.”  Benfey, however, assumed two great branches of Semitic nationalities, one flowing into Africa, the other into Western Asia.[184] Ebers[185] gives some striking resemblances between Egyptian and Chaldaic words, and says he possesses more than three hundred examples of this kind; and in Bunsen’s fifth volume are comparative tables which give as their result that a third part of the old Egyptian words in Coptic literature are Semitic, and a tenth part Indo-European.  If these statements are confirmed, they may indicate some close early relations between these races.